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Voters in the crucial swing state will also decide key questions on their — and our — climate future.
In four days, Pennsylvania will become just about the most important place on Earth.
It is unlikely that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump can reach the White House without carrying the Keystone State; winning Pennsylvania bumps either’s odds of prevailing in the whole election to over 90%, according to polling analyst Nate Silver’s models. The state will also play a deciding role in control of the U.S. House and Senate, which in turn will help or hamper the next president’s agenda. America’s domestic trajectory, its foreign policy decisions, and even its allies and enemies could all come down to the whims of the state’s 8.9 million registered voters.
But Pennsylvanians have other important choices to make on their ballots, too. “Pennsylvania is a major energy state, and its decisions — regardless of what type of energy it is — have a huge impact on America’s energy portfolio,” John Qua, the campaign manager of Lead Locally, which is supporting 17 down-ballot candidates in the state, told me.
As the nation’s second-biggest gas producer after Texas and third-biggest coal producer after Wyoming and West Virginia, Pennsylvania also holds the distinction of being the fifth-largest greenhouse gas-emitting state in the nation. Its state legislature hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 2008, in large part because of the influence of the fossil fuel industry over local politics. The American Petroleum Institute donates more to Pennsylvania lawmakers than those in any other state, and while fracking isn’t the decisive local issue it’s made out to be in the popular consciousness, it still employs around 100,000 people — more than made the difference in deciding the 2020 election in the state. (Harris notably reneged on her 2019 pledge to ban fracking if elected in an apparent overture to Pennsylvanians, although the state’s imperiled Democratic senator, Bob Casey, has been hammered by his Republican challenger over her prior position.)
Pennsylvania has a Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, until at least 2026, and Democrats hold slim control over the state House of Representatives by a margin of 102 to 101. The ambition this cycle is to keep the state House and flip the Republican-held state Senate. Picking up three seats there would earn Democrats a governing trifecta, with a tie-breaking vote going to Democratic Lt. Gov Austin Davis. Flip four seats, and they’d have the majority.
But “if you asked me to bet you $10 that the Democrats would win, I wouldn’t take the bet,” David Masur, the executive director of PennEnvironment, a green research and advocacy group that works in the state, told me. “I think it’s just a long shot.”
The path to winning the state Senate and achieving a governing trifecta clearly runs through three districts. The first and easiest pickup is in SD-15, around the state capital in Harrisburg, where the “map is much friendlier to Democrats,” according to Masur. The party would then need to win a competitive seat in SD-37, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, which has tilted blue recently and also seems theoretically within reach. But things get trickier in SD-49, Democrats’ “white whale” district in Erie County, which President Biden won by 2 points but where Republican senator Dan Laughlin remains well-liked. To wrest back the chamber, in other words, the Democrats would “have to run the table,” Masur said. “I don’t even think there’s another race where you could go, ‘Oh, they could get the majority by winning this other seat.’ There’s nowhere else to go. They have to win those three.”
Because of recent redistricting, the climate groups working in the state are cautious about getting their hopes up too high. “Flipping the [state] Senate, which is currently held by Republicans, might be a two-cycle endeavor with these new maps,” Lead Locally’s Qua said. This doesn’t necessarily mean all is lost: Even maintaining control of two of the three levers of government in Pennsylvania would be a victory, and Democrats this summer managed to garner enough bipartisan support to pass legislation to bring solar panels to state schools.
But the stakes — and promises — of a trifecta feel crucial and tantalizingly close. According to a recent analysis by PennEnvironment, Pennsylvania is 48th in the nation for the percentage growth of total solar, wind, and geothermal in the past decade, and 46th in the nation for the percentage of growth in total solar over the past five years, generating less than its neighbors New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio. “The fossil fuel industry is extremely moneyed and extremely influential, and it’s created a political reality where it’s very difficult to move good climate and clean energy policy forward in Harrisburg,” Flora Cardoni, PennEnvironment’s deputy director, told me. Climate obstructionists in the state Senate often refuse to call up good environmental policies for votes, leaving the state with “no laws on the books that require utility companies in Pennsylvania to increase the amount of clean renewable energy that they provide to their customers” which is “a huge impediment to progress.”
It’s not as if Democrats aren’t ready to go — they are. Shapiro is sitting on a two-bill plan for tackling climate change in the state. One would boost renewable energy to 35% of Pennsylvania’s total generation by 2035, which Cardoni described as “a huge step in the right direction, although we need to do much more.” The second bill would make polluters pay for their carbon emissions and spend the resulting money on clean air, water, and energy efficiency projects — essentially, a backup plan for if the state’s attempt to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative fails. (Owing to a question of constitutionality, RGGI is in limbo with the state’s Supreme Court.)
So, in a sense, you have to go for it. “Yeah, they’re really hard races,” admitted Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, which is supporting 26 candidates in the state. “But if you win,” she added, “you win the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country.” While she was loath to “compare our states against each other,” Spears pointed out that Pennsylvania’s emissions are about two and a half times those of Arizona, which makes it a much bigger opportunity for reductions.
Perhaps the most important point: No one really knows what’s going to happen. Not only are organizers working with new maps in the state due to 2022 redistricting, but state-level races also rarely attract substantial enough polling to make reliably predictive guesses, especially when there are so many toss-ups and razor-thin margins. Adding to the trickiness, Pennsylvania is one of the few states where residents still appear willing to split their tickets; in 2020, ticket-splitting between the president and the state Legislature was up to 15 points in places, which is part of why Climate Cabinet has targeted races in the state with margins of up to 10 points that other groups wouldn’t touch. “Folks have been like, ‘the Pennsylvania Senate’s not doable.’ That’s the word on the street,” Spears told me. “But I think people are forgetting a little bit that that was also the word on the street about the Minnesota Senate and the Michigan legislature,” which flipped during the 2022 midterms.
What’s encouraging is that Pennsylvania voters — contrary to their image of being fracking obsessives — have been curious or even enthusiastic about pivoting to clean energy when organizers have spoken with them. Following Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused outages across the state, many residents now “recognize that the grid is outdated,” Julia Kortrey, the deputy state policy director at Evergreen Action, a national climate advocacy group, told me. There’s an acknowledgment among many that “the status quo is not working.”
As in many parts of the country this year, local races in Pennsylvania are mainly focused on battles over education, abortion access, immigration, and crime, not necessarily clean energy. But often, climate-related issues are bubbling just under the surface. “I’m not going to go up to someone’s door and ask ‘What issue is on your mind today?’ and have them say, ‘I’m really worried about the PM2.5 concentration or the Mauna Loa CO2 readings,’” Spears told me. “But if they’re like, ‘The cost of living is too high,’ I’m going to have a conversation about home insurance.”
A particularly good example of this is playing out in one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House races, which will help determine the ultimate makeup of Congress. In the Lehigh Valley, Democratic Representative Susan Wild is attempting to hold off her Republican challenger, state Representative Ryan Mackenzie, who voted against the school solar bill and the state’s clean water act. Wild had been particularly instrumental in helping to replace lead pipes in the area, and she’s made her leadership on the issue prominent in her campaigning. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and lead pipe removal can seem very — I don’t want to say national, but it can be hard to visualize,” Nate Fowler, the regional campaigns director of the League of Conservation Voters, told me. “But for voters in this part of the Commonwealth, it’s easy for them to understand why this is so important.”
It won’t be until after the dust from Tuesday settles — when Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes have been allocated, and its U.S. House and Senate races decided — that national attention will turn to the consequences of the state’s down-ballot races, if it ever does. But whether Democrats run the table or Republicans eat into their opponents’ grip on the legislature, Pennsylvania’s elections will be pivotal to the nation’s greater evolving energy story.
“So much of what we can accomplish in Pennsylvania will lay the groundwork for what is accomplished across the country,” Kortrey, of Evergreen Action, said. “I tell folks, ‘If we can do it in Pennsylvania, we can do it anywhere.’”
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.